


My Kind Of Bitch

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Black Romance, F/M, Religious Fanaticism, Self-Harm, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-16
Updated: 2015-07-16
Packaged: 2018-04-09 16:24:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4356098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Aw, but you need me alive, don't you? Or you'd get in trouble. You're already in trouble, aren’t you?" He grins mirthlessly, talking fast. “How much trouble are you in? You weren’t supposed to sample the goods, were you? You’re gonna get a spanking, aren’t you. A big clown-shaped reprimand. You’re gonna scream because of me. You’re fucked.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Kind Of Bitch

**Author's Note:**

> _She shot me once and stabbed my neck  
>  And even broke my nose   
> But I lick her from her crooked neck   
> Down to her stringy toes, my kind of bitch_

**  
  
  
**

The first night you do your prey the basic courtesy of ignoring it. Fear tends to take trolls in ways that are kind of awkward, in the aftermath, and anyway an inappropriate boner isn’t your goddamn problem. You lash him to a tree with your best bite-proof wirecore rope, ruffle his silky hair condescendingly between the horns, and settle down by your campfire for dinner and a good day’s sleep to the tune of his breathless and continuous bitching.

The second night he has the dazed, miserable look— and rank stink— of an adolescent who’s traded sleep for a genuinely monstrous session of self-stimulation. His tattered leggings are pasted to his legs— his slim thighs— with sweat and worse. You wonder how many times he’s come, watching you sleep. How much of his own material’s been bottled up in that wiry frame, as he squirms and watches you with bright and hateful eyes.

You don’t carry him over your shoulder the second day. You tie his hands in front of him— he watches you, your mouth, licks his lips— and drag him along behind you. You feel his stare like sunlight on your backside. It’s been— _messiahs all hail_ , it’s been a _long_ fucking time since anyone looked at you like this, sincerely hungry for you, not just pathetically trying to trade some shitty blowjob for their lives. You’re nowhere near past your prime but your church-work is all long stretches away from civilization and hardly enough pay to buy much in the way of company once you’re back. You’re not cute enough these nights for someone to take you home, really, and never in town long enough for any kind of pitch connection that doesn’t involve a slap on the ass and a brief tussle out back of a bar.

So it’s flattering.

Awful, but flattering.

When you pause to give him water he drinks eagerly, throat bared fearlessly, clutching— and then he bites your wrist, quick as a hissbeast. His fangs clash harmlessly on the steel-mixed chitin of your gauntlets and he only succeeds in opening up a bright line of his mutant blood on his cheek from the side of your clawblades, as you shake him off.

There’s a moment— a fucking _moment_ , it goes through you like a garrote wire snapping taut— where he looks up at you from his knees, bright blood between his fangs, bright blood down across one smooth, soft cheek. He looks up at you and your breath catches. And he _sees_  it.

“ _Meulin_ ,” he says, softly. Licks his front fangs clear. His voice is soft and sweet when he’s not squalling fit to burst your eardrums. He says, “...Meulin Leijon.”

Your title’s been _Huntress_ since before his sacrilegious zygote inserted itself into a shell and your backhand sends him spinning. He sprawls out in the dirt of the forest floor and laughs and _laughs_ , mouth filling up again with blood. It drips from his plump lower lip and you’re... afraid. He grins up at you and he knows he’s right. He can read it right out of you.

“You sure grew up pretty,” he says, and then “ _umf,_ ” as you kick him in the ribs.

The second night is a hell of questions. He wants to get to know you, and quizzes you with bright and cheery sadism. _Where were you hatched? What was your lusus like? How did you get into freak-hunting, anyway? Do you like it? Do you keep count of everyone you’ve killed?_

 _Not anymore._ Your shoulders tense up at that one and you know he’s seen, because he savors your discomfort in silence for ten long steps before he starts up again. _Who was the first person you killed? Did you know them? Did you have to or just want to? Do you have to kill people you like when you’re a huntress? How are you going to feel when you’ve killed him?_

“ _Relieved,_ ” you snap over your shoulder, and he crows with laughter. You’re not supposed to talk to the prey, and you’re not sure whether your anger at the slip-up is worse than his delight at it.

“So you’re not deaf after all,” he says, taunting— like you’re hatefriends, teasing back and forth— you yank the rope sharply and topple him flat on his front. Drag him a few steps till he regains his feet.

He’s quiet for a while, pissed off and sulky as he brushes mud and leaves from his face as best he can, and then the questions start again. _How’d you get this assignment? Was it a choice mission because you’re the best murderer on the continent or some kind of punishment because you actually suck at murders? How much will the bounty be? What will you spend it on? Have you considered spending it on soap?_

The second night you make good time, but it’s a long, long hike. You’re glad to break off for the day by a bend in a stream, and you trip him into it. He smells of sweaty, adolescent rut and when he comes up sputtering and indignant you toss a bar of cleanser and a washrag his way. The bar hits one of his horns and you don’t hide your smirk in time. His glare goes hot and hungry.  

He starts to strip. He toes off his shapeless boots, then takes his— takes his bound claws to his sleek-muscled thighs, hooks his fingers through the rips and holes of his leggings and— messiahs all hail but your mouth is dry and you’re staring like you don’t have two braincells to rub together.  He pulls the thin fabric off in tatters and when he bends over— _no one_ needs to hike their ass in the air like _that_ to get their heels clear of their leggings— and the curves to him, the clean and lovely arc he makes posed there in the water, glittering— you come to your senses abruptly and turn away.

Your ears are burning like you’re a wiggler again, fumbling over your first nudie mag. Shit’s disgraceful. You’ve been rationing your smokes out but this calls for one, and you cram it between your fangs and light just as you hear the distinctive splash of a kid letting saviors only _know_ how many hours of pent-up genetic material loose. You take a deep, sharp, steadying toke and hold the smoke in your lungs, grimly counting the seconds through the kid’s soft and ragged gasping.

He finishes his business as you examine and clean your gear, and wipe the worst of the road dirt and sweat off with practiced strokes of a washrag. When you look over he’s sitting on the bank next to you, chewing idly at the knot around his wrists. He’s naked as the day he hatched and when you realize this— when he _sees_ you realize this— the sulky pensiveness in his face melts into something bright and mean.

“I don’t have any more clothes!” he says, grinning like a landshark. “How about _that,_ huh?”

You want to put your smoke out between his fire-colored eyes, but instead you suck the cherry down to your clawtips and flick the butt into the stream. Joke’s on him: the worn traveling cloak you confiscated from him at the start of all this is rolled up neatly in your pack, and you knot it briskly around his narrow hips in a well-practiced kilt. This isn’t your first hunt, and fuck him and his juvenile arrogance for acting so.

You eat, feed him a few sticks of dried meat, then go to tie him to a sturdy tree for the day and things go distinctly awful-shaped. Tipping him on to his ass against the trunk doesn’t get him hot and bothered but when you go to shift his bindings from wrists crossed in front to wrists lashed out and around the trunk he gasps, quietly, and shivers. His legs spread under the kilt, his head tips back against the bark. You squeeze his wrists over the secure bindings, one fine thin collection of meat and bone in each of your long-nailed, work-roughened hands, and he lets loose a beautiful high trembling whine. He smells like sex all over again, already, and you wouldn’t be seven sweeps again for all the gold in the empire.

“Kinda young to be this kinky, aren’t you?” you ask, and then curse yourself again at the dazed and needy hatefulness with which he meets your eyes. You don’t talk to your prey. You get them back to the office, process them, spend a night on the town with your earnings, and head out on the next job. You’re not supposed to catch your lip in your fangs and pause there, crouched over this gorgeously wound-up little scrap of fuckmeat as he begs you with his hips and his throat and his eyes to plow him into the next century. You shouldn’t let your paws tighten on his little wrists.

You get off him, your breath very slow and very even, and you go lie down a respectable distance away, and you very resolutely don’t do anything to yourself under your furs. You go to sleep.

The third evening starts out bad and gets worse. He’s glassy-eyed as before, his face set in a distant agony as his hips stutter and twitch. You’re actually impressed: you keep your prey on short rations, and the kid shouldn’t have had the calories to fuck himself all day long. But he seems to have managed it.

 _Messiahs take your cursed genetalia_ , but you wonder how long he could please a partner.

You strip the knots from his raw pink wrists, nudge his ass with your boot tip.

“Stream,” you say. “Clear that outta you.”

He limps off to the water and finds what must be one holy fuckton of release, because instead of trying to run away afterwards he just splashes back to the bank and flops on to it with what looks like every intention of passing out.

You actually think about letting him. You’ll make shitty time dragging him, sure, but then again he’s got to have emptied out every last drop in the spank bank so if you sling him over your shoulder he’s not going to make it gross. Still, though, it means your face getting close and personal with his ass—  _non-recreationally_ — or his face getting acquainted with your tits— again, _non-recreationally_ —and frankly that all sounds like the kind of hell-trial you’d like to postpone till you’re proper dead and damned.  It’s easier to tote prey when they don’t like it.

Kicking him in the ribs though earns you the sweetest snarl, and he actually has the brass globes to roll to a crouch and pounce you. You wreck his shit as efficiently as the first time around and when he’s on his side, all tuckered out, you bind his wrists and pay out some lead.

“Up,” you tell him, and _oh,_ that beautiful glare. A girl could get used to a glare like that.

You make really shitty time.

The third morning— you— you don’t— it doesn’t go well. He knows clear and proper what’s coming and he struggles when you tip him against a tree, he tries to lurch free when you get one of his wrists spread.

“Please,” he gasps, word slurred out frantic. “ _Please,_ oh, fuck, please. I’m going to _die,_ this's how I’m going to die—”

Dramatic little shit. You pull the rope firm and a sick and unprofessional part of you— namely everything from your neck on down— _thrills_ at his full-voiced wail.

He throws a hell of a tantrum, made even more impressive by how his bulge arrives to the event bright and early. He kicks and cusses and begs and threatens and at the end he’s hanging from his bonds, dripping tears and sweat and lube, and he looks so defeated, and so hopeless, and so goddamn ready to roll over and— _and_ —

“I’m going to die like this,” he says, and his voice hitches in time with his restless hips.

“You’re _definitely_ too young to be this kinked,” you say. He laughs crazily, half-sob, and makes as if to kick some leaf litter at you. The motion evidently does something sweet to his insides and he arches up, swearing fit to bust a lung, his spine a gorgeous bow of need and helpless pleasure, and you can smell him from five yards away. His kilt’s gone sloppy enough that you could see— _if you cared to_ — the whole show, the strain and pulse of his bulge curled into his own nook.

He’s _prey_. He’s not going to die like _this._ He’s going to die in the office, with full fucking ceremony as is awarded to the well and truly despised by your laughing lordships, his blood and brains due to be splashed across the dust of a holy ring. And you’re going to do the paperwork.

“Meulin,” he says raggedly. “Fuck. We were— friends once—weren’t we?”

If you’d ever been friends with anyone like this kid, when you were anything like this kids’ age, you think your life would have been— you think— you would have been— messiahs all forgive you your shameful heart, how you’d have _worshipped_ him—

“Meulin, _please!_ ”

“Shut up!” you yell. “Shut up, _shut the FUCK UP!_ ”

“FUCKING _KILL ME_ THEN,” he screams back at you. “KILL ME HERE, _THIS IS HOW I DIE._ ”

And you’re crouched over him in a blind black fury and you don’t know how, you’re breathing in the radiant heat of him, the smell of his heretical blood and his fucked-up desires and how _gorgeous_ he is, how it sings through you, this beautiful little thing, that something so pretty got wrapped around anything so foul.

“You’re not going to die _here_ ,” you say. “I do my god-given work.”

“ _Do you now_ ,” he hisses and he’s such a fucking punk, he’s so _young_ and you hate him for it and you’re kissing, a scrambling furious clash of fangs. He’s shit at it, and mauls himself against your teeth even more than you can manage. His blood is sweet on your tongue and the beast inside you rises up and purrs hate, purrs vengeance. His mutant blood and bone are slated for the Dark Carnival but you can spill some of it first, can’t you. You can take him for a goddamn test run.

His kilt comes off and you wrench his bulge out of his nook and pump it in your rough fist, thumb the delicate tip, you watch him learn new ways to scream. His tight little ass slides between your legs easy as anything and his heels lock around the small of your back like he thinks you might change your mind— _and you should, shouldn’t you,_ but you aren’t. You’re reckless on his hate, drunk on sucking it right from his lips.

Your skirts come off and he sobs your name when you take him, hard and rough, goading him to let you further, to ripple and cry around the curl of your bulge. His own hot little piece of meat you keep captive in your fist, and you fuck him mean.

He was a virgin, before you.

Messiahs damn you both.

*

The evening finds him fast asleep, crumpled broken against the tree, blood smeared on the bark where it opened up the soft meat of his shoulders. Blood spattered into the leaf litter.

Blood on your hands, as you dig your nails into your arms. As you curl over your knees towards the setting sun and pray. You _beg,_ wretched and ashamed and each line you dig out of your sinner’s husk is a votive, an offering of pain. But you could flay yourself, you know, and it wouldn’t wipe you clean. You took your pleasure from the mouth of a mutant heretic, a laughingly blasphemous piece of prey. You knew it was wrong and— and there’s no sacrifice as pays for a sin so glady committed.

It’s well and truly night before you can balance your shame with your duty, and at some point the kid’s woken up to watch you. You tend to yourself until your penance— _pathetic, inadequate_ — scabs over, then tiredly come over to give him water and food.

He drinks quietly, chews the meat. Side of his mouth is swelling up sunset-purples. You must have clocked him a good one, at some point. When you untie him he gives a final shiver and sigh, then stands and looks up at you. He turns your bare hands over, slow and gentle, and you let him, and _oh,_ the sadness with which he looks upon the hatchets branded into your wrists, over the weak and tender flesh, the blood and bone.  

“You’re a subjugglator,” he says, as if he is personally disappointed in you. You cough a bitter laugh at his goddamn nerve.

“No. I’m not fit to wear the paint.” The scum-green offerings along your arms give ample claim to that. “But I serve as I can.” You touch the same mark he’s got his hot fingers on, feel the raised silver of it. The memory of pain.

“ _Faithful_ ,” he says. Still so sad. You box his ear for it, and he staggers.

“You don’t _know_ me. You don’t _judge_ ,” you warn him. You lash his wrists and clamp your gauntlets back on for tonight’s business. The two of you set, you drag him off towards the office. There’ll be two sufferers slated for the Big Top’s entertainment, when you get back. Green blood dashed against the sawdust right over the red. It’ll look nice, you think. Pretty.

Now that he’s gotten the better of you once he seems to think it’s to be an ongoing arrangement. He sticks close, treading on your heels, knocking shoulder to your side. Once he pulls your hair, and you give him a good hard whack across his horns for the disrespect. But he still sticks close as a sex-starved shadow. _Messiahs,_ if you’d only known your fall from grace would win you a free puppy.

You hold out till after midnight, when he actually manages to trip you into a stumble. You round on him, frayed to a fucking thread, and snap, “ _Do you want to fuck?_ ”

“Yes!” he says eagerly.

“Well, tough,” you say, and continue briskly onwards. He calls you names that would burn your ears off, if you were inclined to listen to anything more than the satisfying breathlessness of his frustration and then there’s a jerk on the line and it snaps harsh in your hand. You look back and somewhere along the way you’ve paid the rope out long enough for him to loop it around a heavy branch, then set himself to hold against you.  

You are a fool and you deserve this.

"You wanna hang from that tree, kid?"

"As a matter of fact--"

"By your neck."

"Aw, but you need me _alive,_ don't you? Or you'd get in trouble. You're _already_ in trouble, aren’t you?" He grins mirthlessly, talking fast. “How much trouble are you in? You weren’t supposed to sample the goods, were you? You’re gonna get a spanking, _aren’t_ you. A big clown-shaped reprimand. You’re gonna _scream_ because of me. You’re _fucked_.”

It’s true, to an extent. Not so hard to guess, though, so it’s not like you’re much impressed. You tilt your horns back and tug the rope to watch the strain ripple through his narrow arms, his delicate chest. He laughs and bares himself to you as he goes up on his toes, hangs from his wrists. He throws his head back and angles his hips like you’ve put him on display and he is _beautiful,_ sweet flesh laid out smooth below a nebula of red-violet bruising. He’s heating up again, mouth open, eyes closed, young and eager and fucked in the head harder than anyone could fuck him up the pipes.

“Tell me what’s waiting for you, when you turn me in like this,” he says, slurred and savoring. “Tell me how they’re going to hurt you. You caught me, didn’t you, you fffucked— _hhh_ — you’re— tell me how you’re going to _pay_ for it.”

“I’m going into the ring alongside you, kid,” you say, and have the distinct pleasure of seeing his eyes flare open like two struck matches. That red, _god_. That fucking red.

“Meulin,” he says, softly. “Oh, fuck.”

“We’ve both punched our tickets, little brother,” you say, grinning at his horror. “They’ll pour us out together.” You stand straight and proud and unafraid. You chose this. You’ll neither flinch or falter from the consequences. But he looks at you like you told him a tragedy.

“That’s not right,” he says, and he sounds so young. Itty-bitty baby blasphemer, his mouth full of misplaced pity. He says, “What the _fuck,_ and you’re going to _let_ them— I _made_ you, I forced you into it, I’ll _tell_ them—”

“Don’t you spell to _me_ the rights and wrongs of this situation, child,” you say. “You don’t sit in judgement. Your freak-hands aren’t fit to take my soul.”

He hangs there. “Fuck. Fuck! _Now_ you wanna talk to me, now you want to have a _fucking discussion_ and it’s about how _happy_ you are to get murdered for your stupid made-up circus-fuck clown-religion.”

“Nothing to discuss,” you say, and come close enough to unstring the loop from the branch. He goes back down to his feet.

“We could just... not go,” he says, and dares to smile at you, all hope, he presumes to offer you this tainted devil’s deal.

You slap him a good one across the chops. He makes a small, shocked “ _oh!_ ” and reels back a step.

“Don’t you _presume_ —” You loom at him, can’t help it, breathless with fury. You DO YOUR WORK. You crowd into his space and glare down, revel in the way his chin’s got to tip back up.

“ _You can’t have me_ ,” you hiss. “ _Defiler_.”

He sees something in your face as you didn’t mean to let show, and his eyes go horribly soft. His face can look so sweet, when he’s neither snarling nor sulking. He goes up on his toes and presses his bruisy mouth to yours. Soft. You’re shaking with rage.  You are one another’s deaths, now. You won’t take on the shame of anything less, and your hands have already come to cup his narrow shoulders.

“You’re a freak,” you tell him. “A desecration. An affront to any who are set in judgement over our blood and bone and souls, you’re _wrong_ , you’re a _CORRUPTION_.”

“ _Shh_ ,” he says, laying kisses along your jaw like petals of some terrible flower, sweet, _so fucking sweet_ and you stagger back, blindly, you retreat. Your gorgeous damnation follows you down, climbs into your lap, licks your burning hateful tears. “ _Shhh, shh. Shh_.”

He fucks you flat on your back, takes your bulge and shakes himself wetly apart as you dig your claws into his tight little ass and call him every unkind thing under the moons. When you pour yourself into him it’s like you’re pulled inside out for it, you come so hard. He devours you. This unholy child, he eats you up and licks your bones for more.

You hate him. You hate yourself. You sleep with him curled in your arms.

*

You wake and fuck each other. You get two miles towards the office and you fuck each other. You take a damn nap because it's been a long time since _you_ were seven sweeps, and you get another mile and you fuck each other. Your brains have poured out through your bulge and what’s left of you sings carnal purpose, you spend the night in a scrambling mess of teeth and claws and furious lust.

His tight ass, his tense nook, his insolent mouth, you stretch him wide and show him what a body can take and messiahs all hail but _oh, he takes._ He looks at you like you set the stars in the sky just to piss him off and he sinks himself into you like he wants to leave a crater. He fucks like he’s been waiting for sex for a thousand sweeps and can’t get enough of it now it’s on offer. You’re damned, you’re doomed. You are thoroughly screwed.

You are sheath-deep in his sopping wet nook and _stupid_ with the sick pleasure of it all when roughly double your weight of rainbowdrinker comes down on you like an avalanche of spikes. You’re ripped free of the boy’s body and bowled clear across the mossy riverbank you’d stopped by, more preoccupied with keeping your bulge from getting torn off than with petty trivialities like which way’s up. Mud and water slap up around you with an icy shock and the rainbowdrinker’s still on you, built like a thermal hull of muscle and clad in a poisonous, dizzying array of green stripes. You wouldn’t know what to aim at even if you had your gauntlets on, and when you take a swing at where you hope her face is, her fangs open your arm from wrist to elbow. Your blood sheets into the water, burning, and then she has you face down and drowning, her claws locked in an iron collar around your neck.

Messiahs, is this embarrassing. You’re going to die with your bare ass in the air and your skull shoved into the mud for the snails to chew. You fucking hope you just turn ghost or ghast, you can’t face anyone on the other side with this kind of crossing.

“ _Mom, no!_ ” someone yells, far away, and then all of a sudden the pressure’s ripped off and you kick and cough and drag yourself desperately up the muddy bank. You flop on your side and do your best to replace the water in your internal oxygenation structures with air, as above you the little heretic stands bold as brass and naked as hell. He’s got his delicate hands on the rainbowdrinker’s massive shoulders and— _fuck_ — your green running down the inside of his thighs.

“She’s alright, mom,” he’s saying, urgently, “she’s okay, she didn’t hurt me, we were just talking!”

“Talking,” the rainbowdrinker says, flatly. “Is _that_ what you want to call it, honey?”

“Well, it’s what _you_ like to call it, now, isn’t it,” says the kid, and the rainbowdrinker actually rocks back on her heels and laughs. Her fangs are longer than a lot of trolls’ fingers, holy shit.  

“Intel is intel, sugargrub,” she says, ruffling his hair, then checks him all over, like a preening bird, like a lusus, doting and intimate, even turning him around to look at a bitemark you left on his ass. She shoots you a look, after, and her eyes are like sunlight through leaves. You bare your teeth reflexively, and she turns back to the kid.

“Well, you’re in about as many pieces as I remember,” she allows. “Which quadrant?”

“Red,” he says, immediately.

“ _What_ ,” you try to say, but your voice has been throttled down to nothing and only a hiss comes out from between your fangs.

“She heard me at the last hivecluster we spoke at, and wanted to get to know me better, and, uh, well! We definitely got acquainted, and she thinks hemoequality is great, and we’re all going to live happily ever after, probably.”

“That’s funny,” says the rainbowdrinker, “because she’s got the gear and brands of a Carnival procurer, and you went missing under circumstances remarkably similar to getting your abysmally overconfident set of globes hauled straight off to the nearest three-ring slaughterfest.”

“It is funny!” agrees the kid. “Because she’s not doing that at all anymore. _Is she_.”

He looks at you expectantly. The bloodsucker does not look at you expectantly. She looks at you like someone who has left a lot of bones behind her. She looks at you like she likes the way you taste. And you want to tell them both to go to hell, but if you let this undead bitch pour your blood out in the mud like an animal, here, now — _no._ You can’t face that. But if you can just live a _little_ longer— if you can just wait for a better chance— if you could bring in both of these sinners, two for one, and yours atop—

“No,” you lie. “I’m his, now.” And you nod to the kid.

The rainbowdrinker's burning eyes soften, just a bit. Ease down to something like warm, and her mouth crooks at the corner. She kneels by you, and you think, for a moment, when she reaches out, that she’s going to embrace you, induct you into their abhorrent freakshow with the same kind of sweetness the little fuckblood’s been trying to slide between your ribs.

Instead she gets you by the horn and shoulder, stretches your neck out like a cluckbeast for the slaughter, and—

— _pain,_ and then, worse, a sick pleasure, a shuddering weak surrender—

—she leans back and spits a hank of green meat into the dirt and for a moment you think, stupidly, that she’s ripped your windpipe out. Your hand goes up but what’s torn is a bit behind your jaw, under your ear. The meat in the dirt squirms and squiggles, and the rainbowdrinker leans in again and even though you shove, this time, you try to kick, she has you by the scruff and she licks the wound briskly, unmercifully, and you shiver and hiss and go numb.

“The fuck—?” says the kid.

“Identity worm,” the bloodsucker says. “It’s a breed of datagrub. Kids get one at the end of the trials, before they court a lusus, and by the time they make it up to the carpenter drones they’re registered citizens of our glorious empire. Name, sign, hex code, stipend.”

“Did I—?”

“No. You never even pupated in the caverns. You’re officially nobody. And I cut mine out in the desert. I’ll never work an honest job or contribute to the slurry, but then again, I’m free. And so’s your girlfriend.”

“That’s insane,” you whisper, watching the meat— the worm— your life, all of you, everything that registers you as yourself— curl up and die in the mud.

“What’s your name?” the rainbowdrinker asks.

“Meulin,” says the kid.

“Yeah,” you say, numbly. “Yeah, that.”

“I’m Porrim,” the rainbowdrinker says. “And don’t fret, you won’t get culled if you don’t get caught. And we’re generally pretty good at not getting caught.”

“Except by beautiful ladies,” says the kid.

“Except by them,” agrees the— agrees Porrim. “Up you go, girl. Get your panties on, we’ve a long way to go by daybreak. This neck of the woods is too damn down with the clown for comfort.”

You get shakily to your feet, touching the aching empty space of your throat, and just stand there and tremble for a long moment while Porrim strides off and starts gathering up your supplies: your camping gear, your gauntlets. Your rope.

 _Culling._ Not even a death in the field, not even a failure. You lied to save your skin for just moments more and now your death is to be a _culling_ , now, a— a— a _dismissal, an expulsion_. Your blood won’t be fit to stain the sawdust, won’t be fit to stain the forest floor, it’ll be poured out as filthy slop over the ditchweeds and no one will care. The last act of restitution you could ever make for your sins has been denied you with this one final weakness, this lie you didn’t know was true.

 _Messiahs, spurn my rotten sinner’s heart but I’ve only ever tried to do right by you—_ but you haven’t. You haven’t at all.

The kid has to nudge you with an elbow before you realize he’s got your clothes in his hands. You take them, wrap yourself in furs and leather— he hands you your gauntlets. He watches you put them on, run your dirty thumb over the clawblades. They haven’t even been blunted. He’s dressed in fresh leggings and a smart cloak and looks sleek and smug and damnably beautiful, and he takes your armored wrist in his thin little fingers.

You stare at him in wonder and a hate so pure and fierce it feels as if you could burn up from the inside-out. Char yourself inside your skin and breathe fire. He _stole_ you. Your prey fucking _stole you_. And you let him.  

 _I’m his._ Damn him! Damn you.

“Come on, dear heart,” he says, and waggles his fucking fingers at you. “Let’s go.”

You turn your wrist in his grip and grasp his hand hard enough to crush, to grind his bones, and your clawblades press up against the bare gray skin of his arm, the pulsing abhorrence of his red veins. His grin picks up a sharp and terrible edge, and he goes up on tiptoes to kiss your cheek.

“ _My_ faithful, now,” he murmurs. “ _My Disciple_.”

You are lost to him, your soul forfeit, blown clear out of your chest with rage and lust and stupid pride. Not for you the Dark Carnival’s heaven or hell, the riddle box, the dark decisions. Not for you the Ringmaster’s righteous judgement. Not for you the colors and light, the clean obliteration of a club upside the head, never, never, no more, not ever. Wherever you go now— _fuck, fuck, you HATE HIM you don’t even know his twice-damned NAME—_ this monstrous boy has you in his keeping.

He pulls on your wrist, and you follow.

**Author's Note:**

> _I'm looking for a girl to die with  
>  If you're already dead, that's cool   
> You can sit around and wait for me to die _  
> —Insane Clown Posse, _"My Kind Of Bitch"___


End file.
